China Begins Damming Jinsha River for Second Largest Hydropower Project
Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)
Xiluodu, Sichuan, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) – China began damming the Jinsha River on Wednesday to build the Xiluodu hydropower plant, the second largest of its type next to only the massive Three Gorges Project.
The damming started at 9:30 a.m. and was expected to last 36 hours at Xiluodu where the river is 47 meters wide, said Wang Shukai, vice director of the project under the China Three Gorges Project Corporation.
Workers were preparing to drop more than 3,000 steel rebar boxes measuring about four cubic meters each and concrete blocks measuring 15 tons each into the river that was 20 meters wide as of 5:00 p.m.
The river’s runoff at the site decreased to 592 cubic meter per second, down from the 3,520 cubic meters per second before the damming started, as 83.2 per cent of the water had been diverted and bypassed the dam via five channels that had been burrowed into mountains located upstream.
With a designed installed capacity of 12.6m kilowatts, the Xiluodu plant will be the nation’s second largest hydropower plant after the Three Gorges Plant. When completed, it will be the third largest of its type in the world.
The plant located in the country’s southwest will provide power for the dynamic economies of central and east China. It is also a subsidiary project to the Three Gorges Project in terms of flood control.
When complete, the dam will be 278 meters high with a reservoir containing 11.57bn cubic meters of water.
The project, being built with an investment of 50.34bn yuan (6.76bn U. S. dollars), started construction in 2005 and is expected to be operational in 2015. It will help increase the capacity of the Three Gorges plant and the Gezhouba plant by 379,200 kilowatts, and enable them to generate 1.88bn kwh more power during the low-water season.
Jinsha River, a major tributary of the Yangtze River, flows between Yushu in Qinghai Province and Yibin in Sichuan Province. Xiluodu plant is the first major hydropower project on the Jinsha River that is seen as having excellent potential for hydropower resources.
China plans to build a dozen power plants, including the Xidukou plant, on the upper Yangtze stretch that is home to the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers.
Originally published by Xinhua news agency, Beijing, in English 1039 7 Nov 07.
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